Well it’s been awhile since I’ve written just a post on what’s up with me lately. Maybe because what’s up is confusing and yet somehow dull to me. A couple of great things are happening–I’m seeing a new psychologist who leaves around the bend across the lake and I think she’s…brilliant. Fucking brilliant. The first time in fifteen years I felt like, in therapy, “this is the one. She can help me help myself.” It’s good dammit. Good. I quit smoking. It’s day four. My singing voice is already almost fully back!! I’m drinking tea instead of coffee to cut the cravings for a cigarette and I can’ t believe how much better I already feel. Right now I’ve got the house to myself, blaring the blues, some Aretha, some Richie Havens “Freedom”, some OneRepublic, quite a mix. I feel so damn good today. So calm. Even with the cravings. Maybe I’ve been so much more at peace because I’m on a right path–my path–and I’m ready for whatever happens in therapy. I’m stronger now. I’m willing to get rough. After the first session I went home and cried so hard I was actually doing that embarrassing hiccup thing, because I felt so exposed and vulnerable to myself, not to anyone but myself. I have this steal shield I use in the mirror to keep me from believing shit is hard, to keep me from believing I can’ t do it, that I’m weak. I ask for help from no one, and I just can’t change that. My sister was crying and asking me why I don’t open up, because it’s too much and too hard alone, and I love her dearly for it, but I just can’t. It’s not my…style. You get so used to handling the hard shit alone, pushing down your shoulders and making you sink a little, so you take bigger steps, you gain more muscle in my opinion. I want to rely on myself, and learn how to do it better. I was also crying so hard because she got so much out of me and i don’t know how, but I looked at myself, really looked at myself, and i was disgusted by what I saw. So disappointed, yet I’m so used to disappointment that it wasn’t too much of a crusher. What she’s doing with me is instead of me blathering on the same tired old story about what all happened to me, is we’re dealing with (first) how I’m dealing with it all in the present. She’s taken me back to such basic steps I was blindsided and felt like I wanted to hold her hand because I’d forgotten the importance of ‘the now.’ Back to building blocks, which feels good because I haven’t known up from down in a long time.
Why does it still seem I am still trying to prove myself to myself? Anyone else do this? I think of therapy/dealing with complex ptsd/bipolar/dissociation/adhd as a challenge, and I must win. I must defeat what has beaten me down, I must not let one person own me. I must be the master of myself. I can almost taste it, yet I’m so far. As long as I keep going, I’ll make it. The longer and harder it is, the better it’ll turn out, I know that. It’s about patience. I’m by no means rushing into therapy like I used to, expecting results I could hold in my hands, read and educate myself out of a hole. Oh no. It’s more holistic than that. It’s a 180 from that. Now I go in and I’m like a child eagerly waiting for guidance into what I already know but can’t tap.
Another thing I realized is when you’re in deep water long enough, you get accustomed to it, and for awhile you take the rest of the punches and hits with your chin up, you allow yourself to fully feel the swells of pain that can strike, but what is pain anyways but a tool for success? Anyway, yeah, you get accustomed to it, but then somehow, after so long, you quit treading, and you float comfortably, until someone comes along and steals your fuckin floaty. And you see yourself, comfortably numb to all around you, your life–stuck in this swirling eddy of memories and fears and even, at its worse and most embarrassing–self-pity and complacency. I will not settle for this. I will not be okay with the woman who fucking sits there anymore. She was begging for me to wake up. And then I wonder–is this another bipolar mood trick? Am I really feeling this or am I on the upside of the disorder, seeing things that I will only see and feel for a short while ? Well, if that’s the case I’ll just keep coming back to write about it. Music. Music is everything. It reminds me that I am alive. That I have a say in things, that my emotions are real, valid things that I can feel without doubt and shame and embarrassment. I have a say in things. I have a say in how this shit’s gonna go. It already went down, I swam through the murk at the bottom, I barely rose, but I’m slowly rising to the surface, its a long way. And I can look back at the shore but I’ve come to far to go back from where I came, it’s time to swim to a new shore, a new island of Amyness. 
I can’t go back to what I was, that wasn’t living, from the age of sixteen to thirty I wasn’t living, and I’m still not, but I’m trying, and I’m aware and that’s the key. That’s living. It may not be pretty, I may look at myself and just think “aww shit” but I have choices and options. I remember when it all changed–a specific point. I was sixteen (already haunted by memories of sexual abuse and living in injustices via my mother and stepfather and the lack of my real father) and I was in my room in the basement listening to “Free Bird” over and over and I was looking in the mirror and I just couldn’t see myself. I wasn’t there. Just like that. I disappeared. This is also when the bipolar began, I just know it. I can’t explain it, it would take to long, but it was. I forced myself to cry and I just stared at my tears as if they were fake, and i was a fake, a fraud, who felt nothing. I was empty. And I would spend the next fifteen years or so trying to fill that. Until the psychosis and PTSD hit and i went to the bin–when I completely shattered. To a million fucking pieces. But piecing it back together—I get to create what I want to be. Not just what i want to SEE, but I what I want to BE, because my feelings are back in full force. I am not empty anymore. I think all my life I waited for the break, so I could start over.
Sometimes I wonder if even my writing about it all is another way, maybe healthier way, of dissociating from it. No. Because dissociation is a problem when we dissociate from our true selves, not circumstance or the bindings and abuses from others. The abuse, oddly, isn’t what’s been bothering me these past few …months? A year? It’s not my mother (I don’t think, because in spite of it all I love her deeply), it’s not my stepfather, it’s not the memories, its not the flashbacks or hypervigilence or the trauma from the psychosis itself. It’s ME.
So I’m wondering…where do you all write? Do you have particular spots that seem to give you that room? I’m sharing a picture of my spot, it’s at my kitchen counter, usually late, and I can’t sit or I’ll lose focus, so I stand at my counter in my cute little kitchen until my legs go numb and the feet fall asleep. Or maybe, but rarely, at my old kitchen table I refurbished, next to the register and windows, white Christmas lights on, and an uncomfortable chair to keep me on task. I live in a very old house with lots of charm and I love pretty old things, music, books obviously, art, the blues, Ali Farka Toure, Bob Dylan’s bootlegs, Eddie Vedder, lots of indie/folk/bon iver-ish stuff, James vincent McMorrow, Modest Mouse, Radiohead, DMB, Rachmaninov, Ray, Yo-Yo Ma, Billie Holiday, Son House, Adele, bits of everything really; at least that’s commonly what you’ll hear coming from my kitchen. The wood floors creak and the windows are huge, letting me watch Wisconsin snowfalls. I love small, warm lamps/lights, I have them everywhere. My girl’s artwork usually gets framed and I’m making a menagerie for that currently. I really surround myself with what I love. I may be putting in a white book shelf in the kitchen just to keep all my poetry books together, hmm…
